August 17, 1969

A Critic's Reviews

By G.S. ROUSSEAU

CONTINUITIES
By Frank Kermode.

ontroversy about criticism has "continued"- as Frank Kermode's title suggests- from the time of Aristotle. And yet, history has the last word: quibbling detractors of Dr. Johnson and Coleridge, to mention two great literary critics, are now relegated to oblivion. Throughout history, some readers have liked their criticism hot, with ample generalities and few facts. Others have liked it cool, with generalities and facts wedded. And then, there have been, of course, the "Emperors of Facts," those learned gentlemen within the groves of academe who specialize in the jettison of other critics- in pure detailed fact.

Mr. Kermode's priorities are perhaps best summed up in Edmund Wilson's statement of procedure, which he quotes. "My strategy has usually been, first to get books for review on subjects in which I happen to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered articles for writing general studies of these subjects; then, finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays were revised and combined."

Almost all the pieces in "Continuities" are reviews that appeared from 1962 to 1967. Yet Kermode aspires to more than mere reviewing. One thinks of him as a latter-day Virginia Woolf toiling ceaselessly on her reviews, dreaming about posterity perusing them at leisure. Kermode, the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of London, wishes to become, like Edmund Wilson, a big, indispensable and copious writer. These revised essays and reviews are but a slice of his total output and he has just turned 50. Whether sustained plentitude will also pave the road of indispensability time alone will tell.

No social theme appears here, although politics and history are important aspects of the works discussed. Kermode views modern English and American literature as an opulent storehouse of treasures for the student of these times. In so doing he sees the complexity of our present culture and treats it with humility and reasonableness. Among the poets, novelists and critics discussed (including T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Allen Tate; Salinger, Malamud, Bellow; Edmund Wilson and Northrop Frye), almost all are post-Lawrentian. Kermode's concern throughout this volume is to discriminate among "modernisms," and he concludes that we of the fifties and sixties have nothing to be ashamed of. Our literature is as rich- particularly in America- as that of any other age.

As in his earlier books, "The Romantic Image," "Wallace Stevens," "Puzzles and Epiphanies" and "The Sense of an Ending," his prose has agility and elliptical elegance. "Like Beckett's hero we can't and must go on" splendidly sums up the plight of the sixties.

If Kermode is one of a few first-rate critics writing today, this is because of a rare kind of intellectual chemistry. He writes well; but more important, he thinks well. His humanism gravitates towards mighty concerns: death-within-life, life-within-death, apocalypse, rebirth. His deep sense of the past helps to illuminate the present. Like the best critics of all times, he is concerned with the general rather than the particular. Salinger's significance, for example, is that of a singular kind of spokesman for the fifties, and this is far more consequential than anything one of his characters says or than anything in Salinger's personal life. Finally, there is a "sense of ending," of this being the final word, in everything Kermode writes. It may be untrue, but the sense is still there.

Where he errs is in a kind of overindulgence; in a form of imaginative hallucinating that tends to distort proportions and significances. He sometimes romanticizes that which is plain (Wallace Stevens's private life) and fails to romanticize attitudes or realities that deserve romanticization (the great contribution of the American Jewish novel since Depression days).

In some cases Kermode's reviews will outlive the books reviewed. Who in 2001 will read the minor novels of Muriel Spark?- A 20th-century Maria Edgworth at best. But his criticism at large may become paradigmatic if more pieces like the masterful chapter on D.H. Lawrence issue. Here Kermode shows how the transitional period immediately before "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love" is marked by a ritual descent into hell followed by rebirth through sexual shell shock- sex "obscene, decadent, and renovative." His point is that such descent and rebirth later become a dominant aspect of Lawrence's fiction, and it is every whit as impeccable and scholarly a theory as the best fruits of the Modern Language Association.

Not all the authors discussed are viewed so perceptively as Lawrence. Wallace Stevens, for examplem is not often seen rightly. "Rightly seen he is," in Kermode's words, "in his shy egotistical remoteness, very central to the whole idea of modern poetry." Personal remoteness is hardly the salient point. Where is Stevens the excrescent esthete, the artistic fraud, the absurd nouveau who cannot order (even by mail!) Ceylon tea without expert advice? Much of Stevens's mystique is the product of Kermode's own rich imagination- a post-romantic tendency, common in literary critics today, that wears well so long as it is imperfectly understood. In this case it shows as well that Kermode has not scrutinized sufficiently the Stevens correspondence.

A myth about the critic's own ubiquity is also found here. Underlying "Continuities" is Kermode's belief that breadth is more important than acute discrimination in depth. This is a supreme fiction and is not borne out by history. Although those critics who remain part of our heritage were concerned with generalities and the "laws" of literature, they all focused their energies on a few authors or problems: Aristotle on Oedipus, Dr. Johnson on morality in literature, Coleridge on the association of ideas, Eliot on a select group of authors from each period. Kermode here concerns himself with all modern literature on a premise that the critic, by touching with the souls of the many, will be saved. Disparate comments about Collette, Hemingway, Golding, Sartre, Eliot, the Dadaists, Sillitoe, Camus, Orwell, Henry Miller and a host of others abound. The real test for Kermode will come when he applies himself in depth to a few of these writers.

Despite such shortcomings, it must be admitted on balance that in this criticism, artist and critic dance together; and deflection of the reader's attention to the acrobatics of the latter is stunningly transformed into art, the great art of literary criticism. It may not always be easy to distinguish the truly brilliant and inventive ideas in these collected pieces, but one thing is clear. Neither Kermode's generalities nor particulars are totally satisfactory, but wedded, and under his treatment, they are about the best we have.

Comparison is in his case invidious: W.H. Auden's periodical journalism is certainly more smart-alecky, Edmund Wilson's more opulently negative and Leslie Fiedler's more obsessed with sexuality and the perennial revolt of the flesh. But where today is there found in a single critic greater breadth, style and quality of mind? Certainly not among the majority of mutant-hacks-turned-seer who have divorced themselves from the academy, or in the academy itself, whose writing is often so solemn and barbaric. This may not say much for the present state of literary criticism. It does, however, for Mr. Kermode.

Mr. Rousseau recently edited a collection of essays on Pope's The Rape of the Lock."